


Sacraments and Such

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22111396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: After an exorcism, Hilda is second guessing.
Relationships: Hilda Spellman/Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	Sacraments and Such

Hilda’s in the solarium pretending to graft. She’s got a branch from—ugh she can’t even remember what kind of tree, lemon maybe—in her left hand, but she’s just sitting there next to a cucumber vine, dazed.

She takes another swig from the bottle of cheap sweet red wine she’s brought out with her. It’s a local vintage. Czech wine, with a little almost carbonation to it. She guesses that’s just how the Czechs do it. She’d never been much of a vintner herself. Couldn’t ever get the tannins right, always ended up making it taste vaguely like vinegar, no matter the grapes or skins she used.

She tosses the branch into a pile of detritus meant for the fire pit and lies down in the cucumber patch, stares at the sliver of moon through the glass ceiling.

She’s wondering how many rites one must go through before she’s deemed an accidental Catholic. She’d participated in a baptism. And now, just last night, an exorcism. And she’s certainly anointed the sick many, many times. She looks suspiciously toward the wine. She wonders if any Czech friar had blessed it, wonders what she might be getting into if he had.

The more she thinks about it, the more she recognizes there’s a lot of overlap between witches and the old Christian mystics. Magical people with forbidden, arcane knowledge. Her own namesake had been one—a botanist and musician, prone to visions. A little too on the nose for Hilda’s tastes. Or maybe just on the nose enough. Maybe prophetic. She does still believe in prophecy, doesn’t she? 

She doesn’t know, and her mind’s still wandering. That’s what sweet Czech wine will do to a person. Or maybe that’s what an exorcism will do to a person. Her limbs are dull and her mind is jumping from one thing to the next back to the first thing.

Ah yes. Christian mystics. She’d had her first kiss in a particularly strange order of mystical nuns’ labyrinth with a pretty young novice. Never even knew the girl’s hair color because it was always under that bright white starched habit.

“What’s the difference, then?” Hilda had said. “We’re both midwives and we both use a lot of magical herbs and chant a lot and get lost in mazes to find answers,” Hilda had said as they had been thoroughly lost in the tall, ominously pruned bushes.

“I don’t know! I’m new!” Sister Mary Teresa had said, throwing her hands up in frustration. Her habit had shifted slightly, but the wispy baby hairs at her temples that had become visible were no indication. Everyone had every color wispy baby hairs. “I think it’s. My God is good and yours is evil.”

Hilda had shrugged. She hadn’t known either. She had been pretty new herself. They’d tabled the discussion and kissed instead.

And now that she’s old, she still doesn’t know. She drags herself up rather heavily and takes another few drinks, lies back down. One thing to the next back to the first thing.

Ah yes. Accidental Catholicism. A hazy little snippet of a memory: balancing a bag of fertilizer in one arm as she was trying to open the trunk, turning slightly for more leverage, accidentally looking right at the open doors of the cathedral letting out from morning mass, making eye contact and doing the “I know you but we don’t need to have a conversation” nod at Mary Wardwell in her tweed Sunday best.

This had been, what? A year ago? Six months ago? Three years ago? She doesn’t know. But she knows Mary Wardwell had gone to at least one Catholic mass. Perhaps as research. Or curiosity. A lark. Some ironic joke. Or maybe there’s something more to it than any of that, something she can’t access.

What she wouldn’t give for a mystical vision.

It’s not so much Mary Wardwell’s inexplicable mass attendance as her own weird feelings about the exorcism. The words of the original Christian mystic: a house divided cannot stand. And was she not of the Path of Night, using her magical powers to expel another in service to the Path of Night?

Nope. She’s not going to think about it. What’s done is done. (Was Lady Macbeth a witch or a mystic? Neither? Both?) It’s all just too much. Deaths happen in threes. Bad things, weird things, happen in incalculable clusters. And if she tries to count them, they multiply even faster. A special type of bacterium, and there’s no penicillin just, as a Christian mystic would say, prayer and fasting.

Prayer to whom and fasting from what?

She sits up, finishes the bottle, tosses it onto the burn pile. She stands and brushes the dirt off her backside as best she can. There are no answers here. Not in her brain, not in this greenhouse, probably not on this temporal plane. And even if there were, would she want them?

Prayer and fasting and waiting. Waiting for the next event, the next vision, the next encounter with the Divine or what-have-you.

One thing to the next back to the first thing.

She crosses to the phone mounted on the south wall, dials 9 for an outside line and then pauses. She doesn’t have any numbers memorized and the operator hasn’t been a thing for decades. She hangs up just as abruptly as she’d decided this.

She should go to bed.

But she doesn’t.

She’s at the sink in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water, winter-tap cold. But at the second gulp there is clarity. There is clarity in Czech wine, and there is a clarity above that clarity.

She’s in the office, and the computer screen gives an eerie glow to the room, jarring shadows and too much focused light into too-focused pupils. A syllabus, an email address, a phone number. An obviously landline phone number.

Hilda’s still not turned on any lights in the room. It’s a secret, in-the-dark thing she’s doing. She can imagine tall, ominously pruned bushes instead of wood-paneled walls.

She’s hunched over the desk, listening to the receiver, and the rings are sharp yet dampened by distance and weather. A muted trumpet in a film noir.

Click-click-click brrring. And then.

“Hello?”

“Miss Wardwell?” Hilda says as if she’s called a pornographic 900 number. 

“Yes?” Miss Wardwell’s voice says, clear and clipped and confident.

“This is Hilda Spellman. And I’d like to speak with you.” She’s tried very hard to seem like someone. Her best RP.

There is a pause. And then,

“I’d like that, as well.” Mary’s voice is thick but still just as clear and confident. “I would rather see your face as we talk. Are you currently engaged?”

Hilda reels. One thing to the next back to the first thing.

“Where would you like to meet?” Hilda says.

Hilda’s still a tad fuzzy as she pulls into the dark parking lot. There is only one other car there. And she can barely discern the figure of Mary Wardwell shooting baskets at the court a few meters off behind the chain-link fence.

Hilda honks her horn, and Mary turns, lets the basketball bounce interminably as she stalks toward the fence. Hilda slides out of her car and also approaches the fence.

They look at each other through the chain link. 

“Why hello,” Mary says. Her fingers are hooked on the chain link.

“Hello,” Hilda says, and her fingers are also hooked on the chain link.

“What would you like to discuss?” Mary says, face too serious for the circumstances.

“Come sit with me,” Hilda says, and Hilda’s back in the Crown Vic, engine warm and blasting hot hair out the ducts.

She watches as Mary threads her way through the chain link and then is at her passenger side door, opening it, flopping in.

“So?” Mary says as she makes herself comfortable. Hilda watches as Mary reclines against the vinyl and crosses her legs.

“So.” Hilda turns down the heater. “So. We executed an exorcism together.”

It isn’t exactly what she would’ve chosen to say if she’d had ahold of her real faculties. But it’s true, and it’s what she’s said regardless.

“Yes. And what of it?” Mary Wardwell says. “As traumatic as that is, that’s not what this is about.”

“What is this about? According to you?” Hilda says.

Mary’s eyes flash supernaturally in the darkness—mystic and magical and weird.

“It’s about what it is. What might be. I’m a vessel. Don’t you believe in prophecy?”

Hilda may or may not believe in many things.

“There’s plenty to be believed or not believed,” Hilda says.

Mary Wardwell places her hand over Hilda’s.

They stare at each other in the full blast of the heater.

“What do you want to believe?” Mary says.

“I don’t know,” Hilda says. “But whatever it is, I want you to be there.”

“Why?” Mary says.

“I don’t know. I just do,” Hilda says.

And Hilda is in Mary’s lap. They’re kissing and writhing against each other.

One thing to the next back to the first thing.

What’s expected.

But then not what’s not expected.

“Wouldn’t you like to see me, experience me?” Hilda says.

“Of course I would,” Mary Wardwell says.


End file.
